There was suspicion plaguing the halls of Della Palace and infecting every person within the ivory walls. From the cooks in the great kitchens, to the lords and ladies burrowed in secret rendezvous, everyone suffered its infliction. The stench of it soured every room the young queen entered and lingered long after the carriers left, but its voice was not that of labored coughs or wheezes. The rumors filled the walls by whispers hidden behind hands and shared between huddles and they spread quicker than fire. Soon there would be no kindness at all for the young queen.
After decades of a robust, albeit cruel reign, the king was dead. Everywhere Lilah went, she felt the unspoken accusations on the tongues of those around her. Tall tales had filled the palace before Lilah's father had even passed, now those rumors seemed to serve as all the proof the people needed of the new queen's guilt. No one dared say it to her face, but Lilah knew what they called her whenever she passed. Usurper.
As the young queen walked through the halls, she looked down at her bedraggled training garb and wished she had brought a cloak to cover herself. Sweat dripped from her face when she bent forward and her raven hair clung to her neck, but worst of all, there was no crown on her head. Lilah could pass as a common woman to anyone who had not known she belonged to royal blood, an oversight she would not make again.
"I think you cut me." Lilah said as her group walked towards her bedchambers. In truth, she did not mind, but the queen was desperate to distract herself from the whispers.
"You weren't focusing." Bleu answered. The head of the Queen's Guard was also dirty and sodden with sweat beneath the brilliant emerald of his cloak, but no one would be disturbed by his appearance. "You left yourself unguarded thrice in that session. The kingdom doesn't have time to bury you three times, so I'd shapen up if I was you."
Lilah rolled her eyes. Bleu had trained her in combat since she was old enough to carry a blade, but he never admitted to himself that Lilah was becoming a worthy competitor. It mattered little to the queen, she needed no praise, her satisfaction came when Bleu left their sessions bruised and bloodied.
Marzonna, Lilah's tutor, walked closely beside the queen and her guard husband, but the woman held a book up to her face and deftly navigated the halls without ever looking away from it. The warm spring breeze jostled the pages as they walked and Marzonna impatiently held them down. "Have you thought about your cabinet meeting?" The woman asked.
"Moss acts as if I'm a child who wandered into every meeting by mistake." Said Lilah. "He's all but withered every ounce of my patience. I've thought about having him skewed and replaced, but that's the extent of my preparations."
"He certainly doesn't think you belong there, that's true." Marzonna said. The sentence was immediately followed by the scholar's absentminded mumblings as she continued to read. Not for the first time, the queen noted that lately her friend had been more enthralled in her studies than usual. The young queen glanced at the book Marzonna held today, but it was in a language Lilah did not recognize.
"He's going to try to rally the rest of the cabinet against me."
"Yes, I'd imagine so." Marzonna answered.
The queen bit the inside of her cheek in barely checked frustration. She was reaching the end of her first month as Queen of Delladine and Lilah had done little but sit in on meetings and listen to men twice her age with half her wit. Borris Moss was Head of Cabinet and Lilah's strongest adversary. The plump man had served as King Gordon's right-hand man, groveling to the top while letting Lilah's father run Delladine into the ground. He had wasted no time conniving to get the rest of his cabinet members to blindly follow his lead as soon as the king died. Among all the whispers, his voice was the loudest and it always called for blood.
Now, Lilah had to face the six men with the same greedy agendas as her late father almost daily. She was a single lion in the center of a pack of hyenas and the queen secretly feared one day she would suffer the death of a thousand cuts. Alone she could eat the men alongside her morning porridge, but together they surrounded her without abandon. Lilah once read that hyenas laugh as they surrounded their prey, but the cabinet smiled sweetly and said biting words dressed up in the ill fitted garb of counsel.
"You must have every ounce of the power in that room. Do not get pushed around." Bleu said, interrupting Lilah's thoughts.
Lilah raised her chin indignantly. It was as if Bleu had heard her thoughts, and she liked it little. Every one of the cabinet members were part of old, wealthy families that lived on the coast of the city Vidan, their expansive wealth were only surpassed by their pride. To make enemies out of the cabinet, was to make enemies out of the most influential people in Lilah's kingdom. Lilah was not one for games and maneuvering, yet even she noted Bleu had oversimplified the matter.
Just like the royal family, cabinet members were appointed for life. Many do not get appointed until they have worked for quite some time in their respective fields, which left only old men of privilege to counsel the queen. There were three ways in which a member could leave the cabinet: by breaking the law, a unanimous vote by peers, or by death. Much to Lilah's disappointment, none of the men had even the slightest cough.
"Noduv has been brought up the last two meetings." Lilah said quietly. Her eyes scanned the halls and found no listening ears, but she was not foolish enough to believe there were none in the shadows.
Marzonna closed her book. "What for?"
"They want stronger laws against false Noduv, but it is clear they do not mean to stop there." said Lilah.
"They would never be able to tell between a false Noduv conjure and a true, they are too ignorant of the practice. Every believer would be in danger." Marzonna's mouth was a tight line.
"So I have noted in the meetings many times."
"Put an end to it." Marzonna said and squeezed the queen's arm until it hurt.
Lilah wrenched free and with a great amount of effort, stopped herself from shouting. Did Marzonna think she was just going to lay down and let the cabinet use her as a rug?
"I am doing what I can."
"Do more." Marzonna bit back.
Lilah regarded her childhood tutor closely. Marzonna had always been hard on Lilah when the queen was young. The woman had become a mother figure when Lilah's own mother had died years ago, but her tough love had never been so harsh as it had become lately. What the queen thought at first was ill-temper seemed to stretch on day after day until it felt more like a permanent disposition.
"I will wait here to escort you to the Ivory Room." Bleu interjected before anything else could be said.
The queen looked up to find they had reached her bedchambers. She took a last glance at Marzonna and then addressed Bleu, "Why don't you get cleaned up as well. Send Van to guard my door and I will be done within the hour."
Before Bleu gave an answer, Marzonna turned and placed a hand on his chest in way of embrace and then walked away. Lilah watched as the woman left and noted that she did not excuse herself to the queen in the appropriate manner. The young queen squinted at the woman until she was out of sight then turned toward Bleu. There was a moment of silence as Lilah waited to hear Bleu's explanation for his wife's strange behavior, but when he gave none, she resigned to turn towards her door.
For a moment, the queen could hear giggling from behind the bronze door and found her feet unable to go inside her own chambers. How long had it been since she could laugh in that way? No answer came to Lilah readily and she knew it had been too long ago to recount. After a pause, she pushed the door open and found three young chambermaids folding linens and preparing a bath for their queen. Just as the young queen opened her mouth to greet them, the women snapped their mouths shut and the laughter clattered hastily to the floor. Their faces, pink from working with the warm water, turned blank and professional so quickly that Lilah spent a moment wondering if they were performers in their past lives.
"Good afternoon." Lilah said.
Curtsies came from all three women. "We just finished drawing your bath, Queen Lilah." The most senior of the maids, Marian, said in way of greeting.
The two younger maids curtsied quickly and vanished outside of the door without a word to their queen. Lilah heard more giggling when they got into the hall and could only assume the girls ran into Van guarding the door. Impatiently, Queen Lilah tore off the uncomfortable leather vest Bleu made her wear for training and threw it in the corner with a satisfying thud. A bright green bruise revealed itself over her left rib when the queen slipped off her dress to examine the day's damage. Pain stabbed through her with every breath she drew and the mirror reflected a myriad of wounds she had not yet noticed, but none marred her face, never the face.
Lilah slowly slipped into the tub and an exhale escaped her lips almost immediately. Lemongrass and mint leaves steeped in the water and their scent rose with the steam. Lilah slid lower and lower until her head was submerged in warm water and she was almost tempted to stay beneath the surface until the world ran black. The feeling of hands rubbing her head brought the queen back from her thoughts and made her rise and take a breath of air again.
Marian had silently begun her duties of washing the queen's hair and scrubbing her hands. "How is your son?" Lilah asked to fill the silence after a moment.
"He is well, Your Highness."
Lilah frowned at the short response. The maids have always been more professional than friendly, one of many reasons why Lilah found herself without many friends, but Marian was usually quite open. "He is a Noduv, is he not? Those flowers you gave me on my name day were much too lovely a bloom for February. I assume he had to conjure them." Lilah tried again.
At this line of conversation, Lilah felt Marian go stiff. Her fingers stopped lathering the soap in her hair and she had to clear her throat before answering, "Yes, Your Majesty, he is."
"Perhaps one day you could bring him to visit. If I recall, he is seven now, yes? I'm sure he would love the stables."
"He does not do well with travelling, Your Majesty." Marian answered stiffly as she rinsed the last of the soap from Lilah's hair. "There, all finished."
With every attempt at nicety spent and declined, Lilah sighed and said,
"Thank you, Marian. I can handle it from here." The woman left without another word.
Lilah got out of the tub and began to get dried and ready, but her thoughts were elsewhere. The more she chewed on it, the queen realized it had been a while since Marian had spoken to her without being spoken to first. The chambermaid had been around since Lilah had become a woman and the two of them had formed not a friendship, but at least an easy air between one another. Yet, as of lately, the woman was tense and formal whenever she had to speak. Annoyance and maybe shame warmed the queen's cheek, the strange behavior had started when Lilah had been crowned. Suddenly it felt like the plague of suspicion had reached her very own bedchambers.
The gown Lilah finally chose was simple, without any lavish embellishments or unnecessary frill. It was lightweight and silken with a simple skirt and sleeves short enough to show her shoulder. She slid it on with ease and stepped her feet into her favorite pair of satin slippers. Though she had always hated it, Lilah knew from a young age that no matter what great things she would do, men cared more for how a woman looked. She did not sulk over the matter, in fact, it amused her to think of the weakness of men. Lilah would wear the silly gowns so the men could gawk and slobber on themselves, so long as they did her bidding or left her alone altogether.
A grin crossed her lips as she sat at her vanity and brushed her hair. Lilah considered briefly how stifling it would be to dress like the women from Amith, the neighboring kingdom. She recalled a feast at Della Palace long ago when her father allied with the kingdom and the royal family brought a litter of honorable guests with them. Marzonna had scolded Lilah for openly gaping at the women when they entered the Great Hall. Every lady wore gowns thick with fabric that did not flow or move like the gowns worn in Delladine, but stayed stiff and crinkled noisily when touched. Around their waists, the women were strapped into corsets that made their bodies seem like clay being molded into a finer shape.
Lilah had always been taught that Amith women held little rights. They could not own land, or fight in battles, or even marry who they chose, but seeing them in person made Lilah truly pity them for the first time. Although the young queen wore the clothes and played her part when it suited her, it seemed like the Amith women had forgotten it was only a part, or even more frightening, had never known. That night Lilah had danced wildly and laughed heartily and took pleasure in her freedoms even when her openness warranted a scolding from Marzonna the next day.
Lilah shook her head to clear her thoughts and tossed on her crown, then the queen walked out into the hall and found Vanick Delacy standing guard at her door. He bowed, low and proper, but when he stood straight his green eyes looked at her with warm familiarity and his lips pulled up at the corner.
"I knew the giggles meant you had arrived."
Her remark wiped the grin from Van's face like a cold splash of water. "The young one can never get a word out before she bursts into that damned giggling. Makes me feel like I've got something on my face." He squirmed as they walked and wiped a hand across his clean mouth.
Lilah looked at her friend from the corner of her eye and smirked again. He was Bleu's right hand, tall and lithe and always dressed in the fine emerald uniform of the Queen's Guard. The queen knew why the girls giggled but took mercy on him and changed the subject.
"I've got something I'd like for you to do."
"Anything."
As the pair walked, Lilah looked down through the marbled pillars into the gardens. There were a few young ladies strolling through the flowers, she saw two men sitting on the stone steps to the far east, and kitchen hands plucking herbs into their baskets. No one had noticed the queen and her guard. "I'd like you to tail Borris Moss the next few evenings." Lilah said quietly.
Van seemed taken aback, but to his credit, he did not voice any reluctance. "Shall I look for anything particular?"
For a moment, Lilah thought about telling Van her unease. She almost told him that her stomach tightened whenever she was in a room with Moss, but decided not to show her fear. "Nothing particular. I only mean to know what he does when he thinks no one is watching."
"Would you like me to find you after he has retired for the night?" Van asked, his words were casual, but Lilah could feel him watching her from the corner of his eyes.
Finding her that late would mean visiting Lilah in her bedchambers. "No, I imagine this will keep you busy through the nights. You can tell me anything of interest in the mornings."
"Yes, of course."
"Start directly after this meeting, I suspect Moss will not be pleased when he leaves." The queen said and then walked directly into the Ivory Room.